• What the Living Do

  • Poems
  • By: Marie Howe
  • Narrated by: Marie Howe
  • Length: 1 hr and 24 mins
  • 5.0 out of 5 stars (11 ratings)

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What the Living Do  By  cover art

What the Living Do

By: Marie Howe
Narrated by: Marie Howe
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Publisher's summary

Informed by the death of a beloved brother, here are the stories of childhood, its thicket of sex and sorrow and joy, boys and girls growing into men and women, stories of a brother who in his dying could teach how to be most alive. What the Living Do reflects "a new form of confessional poetry, one shared to some degree by other women poets such as Sharon Olds and Jane Kenyon. Unlike the earlier confessional poetry of Plath, Lowell, Sexton et al., Howe's writing is not so much a moan or a shriek as a song. It is a genuinely feminine form...a poetry of intimacy, witness, honesty, and relation" (Boston Globe).

This audio edition of What the Living Do is beautifully read by the author.

Cover photograph: Song of Sentient Beings (1134) by Bill Jacobson (1994), used with permission.

©1998 Marie Howe (P)2021 Echo Point Books & Media, LLC

Critic reviews

"A deeply beautiful book, with the fierce galloping pace of a great novel." (Liz Rosenberg, Boston Globe)

What listeners say about What the Living Do

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This is how a poetry audio book should be produced

I've reread this collection many times over the years. It's brilliant. As an audio book, it was the perfect balance of reading a book and doing a poetry reading. There was some commentary of individual poems, but only enough to give space to the other ones while slowing down the temptation to power through all the poems. I hope other poets model their audio book versions of their collections after this one.

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